The Importance of Modern Data Recovery for Enterprises

Oct 15 2018

No-one wants to think of the “worst case scenario” happening to their business, but if it does, the best-prepared organizations are the ones that will survive. In the event of hardware failure, power outages, ransomware, natural disasters, or some other risk impacting your corporation, you must have proper data recovery and data management procedures in place.

Known variously as “Disaster Recovery,” “Business Continuity Planning,” or “Business Contingency,” these are the risk management policies and processes you will use to get your enterprise up and running again as quickly as possible. Data is the lifeblood of the modern organization, so effective recovery procedures are essential — unfortunately, a large number of organizations still use legacy data recovery and management tools, that may not meet the need of a modern business or its customers.

The Impact of Not Having Data Recovery in Place

Research shows that not having a proper data recovery process and system in place can have significant consequences for unprepared businesses:

60 percent of small businesses that lose data without proper recovery in place will shut down within six months.

20 percent of businesses that experience data loss have downtime that costs them between $50,000 and $5 million.

More than half of all businesses that suffer from catastrophic, unrecoverable data loss as a result of a natural disaster will eventually close.

Hardware failure and power outages are the leading causes of losing access to data.

Fixing Legacy Data Recovery and Management Issues

Many businesses don’t update their disaster recovery solutions as quickly as they scale their business and data needs. As a result, these recovery systems can fail at the most critical time — right after an outage. The time to check and update your data recovery policies, processes, and systems is now. Here are some of the areas you’ll need to cover:

Policies — do you have appropriate policies in place governing the importance and urgency of all the data your business collects, generates, and manages?

Processes — do you have proper recovery processes in place to reinstate the most important business and customer data to minimize the financial and reputational damage of downtime?

Capacity — is your recovery solution scalable to meet the growing demands of your business, and does it have enough capacity for all the data demands you generate, both now and in future?

Retention — do you store data for the right amount of time so that you can restore your systems to the last known “good” checkpoint?

Copying — do you have the right types of data copying in place, for example full backups, iterative backups, and system snapshots?

Recovery — can you recover data in the right order and at the right speed, through sequential or simultaneous data recovery tasks?

Testing — do you regularly test your data backup and recovery capabilities to make sure you’re prepared in the event of a disaster?

Solving Data Recovery and Management Issues through a Cloud-based Solution

There’s a simple, scalable, cost-effective solution to your data recovery and management needs — moving data recovery to a virtual datacenter or cloud-based service. This has several advantages:

If you already use cloud service providers, disaster recovery can often be enabled very easily.

If you use local infrastructure, you can often use a cloud provider’s dedicated disaster recovery services to backup your essential data.